In this chapter, I'll very shortly introduce basic sentence structure with a handy question as an example.
As you may have already figured out, Chinese is a SVO language, meaning that it has the same syntax as English. SVO = subject, verb, object, meaning that the average sentence in Chinese would be like "I eat apples". However, if it was a SOV language (just like how Japanese, Korean and many other languages are), the sentences would turn out something like "I apples eat", and so on.
Look at the question '怎麼寫「 because 」?'. You can already see the word 'because' in the sentence. However, '怎麼' means 'how' and '寫' means 'write'. Literally, the sentence means 'How do you write 'because'?'. You can assume in the context the person asking the question is a native English speaker who is learning Chinese, since they involve English words and ask how to write them [in Chinese].
Let's look at this sentence structure from a view of someone who relates it to the typical English sentence structure:
怎麼----------寫「 because 」
How do you write 'because'?
Here, the words 'do you' are eliminated, making the structure a lot more simple. As you can observe, the question word is first, next with the verb, then with the main noun. This is the general sentence structure for questions in Chinese.
The spoken form is '仰般寫「 because 」?', the romanisation being 'ngiong3 ban1 siah3 [word]'.
By knowing this question, you can ask natives how to write a certain word.
Let's look at some more examples (we won't learn them properly):
怎麼吃蘋果？
How do you eat apples?
Simple structure clearly connected to the question we learned before. Question word is present, verb is after the question word ('吃', 'eat') and the noun is at the end, being 'apple' ('蘋果').
你為什麼要吃蘋果?
Why do you eat apples?
There are a lot of changes in this question. Firstly, note the question word; '為什麼', meaning 'why'. Then, note the '你', the subject of this question. The question word will always be after the subject. The question is literally "you why [want to] eat apples?"
你的狗為什麼要吃蘋果?
Why does your dog eat apples?
The subject here is 'your dog': '你的狗'. Therefore, the question is after 'your dog'.
Of course, you could say '你怎麼寫[word]?', but only if you were directing it at a specific person. Otherwise, it is generally 'safer' to use '怎麼寫[word]?'.
In the next chapter, I'll tackle conjunctions and how to use them.
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Non-Fiction'Reconstructing Meixian Hakka: Learning the Dialect of Southern China' is a book rotated around learning the language and having an introduction on how Hakka is structured grammatically in modern China. Reading this book is a must if you want to lea...
